Ten Years in September
by feralhand
Summary: Michael leaves in the morning, saying, "Raphael, watch over Heaven. I will go and save The Righteous Man from Hell." / Castiel has always been in the wrong place at exactly the right time. Sam was standing at Lucifer's gate for a reason. Michael was going to be standing at Dean's. / First Seal & Siege of Hell


Author's Note: A drop in the sea of they-meet-in-hell fics. Here, the camera is zoomed way out.

* * *

Black-mouthed, boar-faced men slide barefoot on a mirror floor strewn with meat. Their howls and whoops are battle cries pouring out into this wide-open place. They squeal, "destiny!" They scream, "we are made for this." Overhead, the sky bruises and bends. Stars fall on their heads and burn in their hair, and they don't care, they don't care. They run with their hands in the air. "This place was built to fall!"

They fall. They bubble and melt away, and the stars crawl out of their bodies like little fires wicking through a dry forest. The stars sit upon the floor. When they try to stand up, they sink halfway down, like they are wading through a river. Reality conforms to their inconvenience. Yes, now it is a river.

"_Michael_," is the impression of sound the light makes. It is a hot breath in a cold place. His name is rises over the wasteland like a new sun. They're not stars anymore when they heave themselves onto a shore of fish bones. They are fragments of the cosmos, yes, but angels through and through. They are angels in a place like this, and the world pales and grays around them. The wings of the Archangel Michael shelter them all from the sticky, red dew that begins misting in their eyes.

Unlike on Earth, they do not need vessels here. They will do this work in their primordial form. Their light digs into the ground and flows out into space. Above them, the sky darkens to black and drips down onto their shoulders. Reality changes again. Rocks tumble into place. A cavern forms. Stalactites reach around them, imprison them for a moment.

"_Mathiel, your company flies first_." Michael gives this order while his younger brothers and sisters bite through their cages. They lay waste to the body of the cave as if it is a great whale that has swallowed them. In truth, they have swum into its gullet all on their own. This task is so important that angels plunge themselves into the great abyss. Michael has told them not to worry, but they all know the dangers of gazing long into a place like this. "_Haziel, fly with your company to the highest reaches. Castiel, take your company to the lowest point. Spread wide but do not spread thin_." Light streams around him as his army breaks off. He is still for a little while longer, a watchful general. "_The wrath of Heaven flies with you. Burn them all in God's name, but leave to me Alastair, and leave to me The Righteous Man_."

God has a plan. Heaven has one, too. Michael tells his brothers and sisters his plan in the fairest of tones, and they all bow their heads with respect and admiration. It started, simply enough, with a demon. This demon said two words, and these words were passed from interrogator to superior, until the Archangel Raphael heard them. They are words that ripped through the fabric of Heaven, and on Earth it rained for seven days straight after that. "_First seal_," Raphael relayed it like this to Michael, and it was a beautiful sound. They understand it to mean _the first seal is broken_. The rest of the angels assume it is a warning instead, and the Archangels let it be.

Michael leaves in the morning, saying, "_Raphael, watch over Heaven. I will go and save The Righteous Man from Hell_." He longs to tell the Host of Heaven, his family, _And he will say Yes, and Lucifer and I will meet on the chosen field, and all of us will go to our destiny, and there will be peace on Earth, and you my dear brothers and sisters can rest. We will be happy and whole again. Everything will be alright_. But he can't tell them. His family is so worn by the weathering of the spirit of the Earth, and by the absence of their Father. He has not been able to protect them from it, and now, he cannot offer them the warmth of hope for fear of burning those that have forgotten how hope feels. He says, instead, "_Lilith plots to open Lucifer's cage. Let us go and we will save the world_." They can't understand just yet, but they will.

_"When we discovered Lilith's plan for you,_  
_we laid siege to hell and we fought our way to get to you before you—"_  
Castiel (4.16)

Time in Heaven stands still. On Earth, it crawls. In Hell, it gallops. For an angel, passing into perdition is the same as being swallowed by an ice water sea that was, a moment ago, solid enough to support their weight. To be here, it is like choking just beneath the waves and sinking into the silt at the bottom of the ocean at once. Time whips by, and in one day they have driven through them all the scars and injuries of a week's worth of battle. Failure begets weakness, for when the angels dodge wrong, when their burning palms miss, demons come down and tear at their grace.

The first time it happens, it's a serpent of black smoke barreling through the flux of Hell, and it consumes an angel whole. They all reel. This death is a shockwave that radiates through everyone, angel and demon; and then Michael obliterates a pack of hellhounds with one crashing, avenging strike and the battle field dance resumes.

More often, though, it happens a little at a time. The angels surge like lightning into the greater demons—the ones that build bodies with discarded viscera and sinew, who fill up their mouths with too many teeth and leave too little room in their heads for eyes or brains. Heaven's soldiers have strategies and they move with cleverness, but every clash ultimately comes down to a feral melee. In the midst of it, senses skew and a battle degenerates into little more than the smell of sulfur, the texture of ash, the weight of a foe between a combatant's fingers. There is pain and searing torment, but it comes in beats, because the angels can't pay attention to that—they try not to pay attention to that. Lesser demons grab hateful handfuls of angels and skitter off into the dark. Pieces of light sway and swirl on the edge of the battle, like heads on stakes. Eventually, there is nothing left.

The angels take heart when Haziel dies, because Michael reaches out and drowns a company of demons in a river that does not run with water, and then he consigns the vacated rank to a sister, Orphiel, in a ceremony that is brief but every bit divine. Though they are far from home, the angels see Heaven in Michael, and they see God's will in their vengeance, and they all know in their hearts they will be victorious in the end.

In the heights of Hell, where the sky is cobbled with the charred vapors of lost souls, Mathiel makes a joyous noise. He announces the death of one of Hell's captains, and every angel hears. Castiel bursts from the swill of magma and blood at the seat of the Pit and raises in salute the ray of his sword. Orphiel screams her smiling assent and dispatches three horrors under the influence of their shared success; and Michael breaks through the first ramparts of Hell.

There are good days and bad. There are bad weeks—months even. The angels comfort each other. They sing in the dark, their choirs booming louder than the thunder of infernal tools colliding with the souls of the damned. "_Thou art with us_," Uriel recites to his siblings. This is a human prayer, from a page in a human book. The angels keep humanity in their hearts these days. They must if they are to survive.

_"What you're feeling? It's called doubt."_  
Anna (4.16)

After a year, the beginning of the war gives way to the middle. The soldiers forget the novelty of destiny. They slog through the slop of death and decay and demons day after day, and they feel nothing but the weight of their weapons anymore. Reality spins around them, throwing each company into another sucking hole of an ever changing battleground. The angels can speak to each other, but their words make very little sense from one company to the next. They hear every call as one command. _There is too much water. Bring fire. Mount the cliff. The ceiling is too low for flight. Scouts report leads in the west, in the smoking caves. I am in the west, there is only desert here. Rally here, the southern descent! The way through is shut._

This is the true power of Hell. The nature of this place is chaos. In Hell, there is no end. There is anguish and there is attrition. It is a demonic art perfected over the course of all time. The angels climb through this and burn that down, and without ever realizing it, they become a part of their torture chamber. It's the grime coating their swords, it's the cackling of faraway fiends stuck in their heads, it's the seeds of doubt from which this place first sprouted—and it works its way into the angels' hearts. The officers catch wind of the foot soldiers' whimpering and murmurs become wholehearted wails, and the captains sense that their companies hover over a precipice that precedes screaming mutiny.

"_All of this, for one human_." Zaliel saves this remark for a late hour when the ebb of demons, from the veins of eternity, slows. He keeps his voice level in the yawning shadow of Heaven's general. This way, it sounds ambiguous and that is best. Criticism would be blasphemy, and blasphemy here is a toxin that can kill.

"_This is the will of God_." Uriel tells him, and his conviction shines over the bowed heads of his brothers and sisters. Zaliel recedes, his light a loop that curls into itself and around itself, protecting his core. Castiel nods briefly, respectfully, and wings away to address an alarm call on the far side of their camp.

Three more years on, they find themselves standing in much the same place. Fog soaks the company in a night time that lasts too long, and light is a memory the angels think of when they think of home. The distance they have traveled cannot be measured by thoughts or words for its greatness, and yet when they stop for a time to rest and warm their fading radiance, they stand in their own footprints. Uriel seems possessed by an echo of distrust and says, "_this task will be the end of us_."

Castiel regards his comrade with fatalistic curiosity. He can't determine if this is a warning or if it is a form of precursory mourning. Either way, Castiel can see where this course of thought runs. It might as well be an ocean upon the face of a flat world. He doesn't understand it so much as he knows he has seen someone drop over the edge. "_Anael_," he hums, like a note from an old song he has just remembered. Their conversation ends there.

She is there the next morning, an incandescent and beautiful will-o-the-wisp on the finger of a meat hook. Castiel's company gushes around him. He, like a storm cloud torn by sunshine, is unable to move. _It's her. It's Anael. Why is she here?_ His deference isn't a thought so much as it is a reaction, a part of his design. He sees her and instantly he is towed by her line. "_Tell me where to go_," he says. Her arm, her wing as one she points and they go. Castiel loses half his company on this day. Angels don't weep, but in a decade he'll look back on this and feel it would have been fitting to do so. _Maybe it wasn't Anael_. The demons, they laugh, and doubt finds Castiel, too, in Hell.

_"A fiddle of gold against your soul says I'm better than you."_  
Lucifer (5.22)

Michael is a beacon and they draw their plans around him. The angels press into the Pit in time with the Archangel's stride. The boundaries of Hell are different, always. At one point, they see a stream filled with sneering eels and lethargic dreams. The next one they fly over is a hallway in a labyrinth of prison cells molded with mortal suffering. One is a wall of dripping barbs, another is a crevasse crawling with reaching hands. The angels' light dampens a degree more at the bottom of every metaphorical stairwell, and the steps keep going. They just keep going.

In the fifth year of the siege, Mathiel drags a spidery demon out of a hollow tree. Together they sit inverted in the canopy of a dense woods, and the angel coaxes secrets and bones from the demon's head. They start with his name. "_Daanen. Your time is at an end_." Mathiel puts his hand upon the demon's rubbery throat, and where they touch each of them feels their being singe and protest. "_Give to me the location of Alastair's dungeon_."

The demon's eyes roll back into his head and the woods splinter and explode. Wood pulp and sawdust fills the air, choking the company of angels and rusting their wings. Mathiel crashes in the center of a perfect circle of fallen trees. Daanen scrambles on top of the angel, smiling, drooling the disease that sickened his heart in the first place. "Let me show you," he coos as the needles of his teeth slide through grace. The crease across the demon's dog-nose seems to say he does not enjoy the taste, or the lack thereof; but he grits his jaws and closes his eyes when the light reverberates like a sweet hymn on the back of his tongue.

It comes apart like this. First, the captain. Then, the plan. Five years hence, they'll feel it as Mathiel does; but for now, Mathiel's company blasts into the debris and gilds the demon aggressor in holy wrath. It's not enough, and far away Castiel and Orphiel turn their heads, and they listen to their brother's agony. _Michael, please_, they beg, but their collective cries are met with an unyielding silence. Michael is working to unhinge the next gate. He is fighting armies. He cannot fall back to pull his siblings from their fires.

Orphiel swings her might out toward Mathiel and ignores the sensation of censure that comes from Castiel. She sends half her angels to satisfy their brother's rescue. The demons wait in the darkness between the two points of light. Wicked claws shred the procession, pull it all apart; and the torture continues. It isn't like the death that took Haziel. It isn't death. Mathiel's screams ricochet across the warping walls of Hell, and it goes on and on and the angels realize he is not going to die. _Oh, God, they won't let him die._

The walls come down on the heights of Hell where Orphiel is stationed. Her fractured company is further scattered as Hell crushes inward on them. Rails of fanged milk teeth gnash and crumble against Orphiel's light. She spreads her strong wings—she can save her brothers and sisters in this way. Bones catch and tangle in the threads of her feathers, and the wreckage melts upon her and colors her wings black, and her light black, and her rays change the shape of the world around her, and it affects her in such a way she has never felt before.

_The front is lost. The heights are lost. We hold the depths still_, Castiel relays. _Tell me what to do_.

Michael falls back, at last—_at last_—family prevails. He'll save them all.

Orphiel is a sight when the Archangel finds her. She is a violet spark in a basin of shadow. She touches every wall at once. Wheeling around and around, she searches for her company, her brothers and sisters. She calls to them with her mouth open wide, but the sound she pronounces is not Enochian.

Michael approaches the tight circle the angels have formed around Orphiel. With their hands joined, these soldiers of Heaven look like little humans putting pressure on a mortal wound. They are all that keep their captain whole. The Archangel rests a hand on one brother's shoulder, and it is a small comfort. The angels, with their faces downcast and sorrowful, step back, and through the gaps that grow in their circle, Orphiel bleeds her light out. Her heart snaps and flits out with a crest of smoke that stains the ceiling. Michael remains with the twice orphaned company and fortifies their camp in the heights while they prepare a strategy to save Mathiel and what may remain of his soldiers.

_"We are losing the war. Perhaps the garrison is being punished."_  
Castiel (4.16)

A river of light carves its way through Hell in the following days. The air is rich with a humid dirge that every angel keeps on their tongue. Castiel sends the soldiers that Michael requests. The captain takes care, making certain that the way is clear and that they will not be intercepted. They lose territory in the depths, they lose morale all along the arena, and it takes two and a half years to gain back a whisper of what they had before it all fell apart. Akatriel comes to lead the company in the heights, and Michael resumes his role as overseer on the night that lore calls the darkest.

_We are fewer, but we are not weaker. Now as ever, Heaven's strength is with us_. Michael is their pillar of hope and faith and strength. What he says is true because he says it.

Angels stare into one another with an expression, a reverb, that pleads, _don't doubt_.

Hester perches at the lip of the pool over which Castiel lingers. The reflection in the water is not what it should be. It shows something wrong and twisted and wicked, and Castiel is momentarily captivated. The shimmer of a sigh from his comrade brings him back to the here and now. She starts, "_I have received reports that the Legion is gathering in the wildflower fields to the north. Hellhounds and fiends. There are horrors climbing the iron towers in the east. They seem to be biding their time_."

"_Thank you_," he tells her in his usual manner of immaculate sincerity. She balks, anyway, and watches Castiel tip and touch the surface of the water. The bed of the pool sucks the moisture into its crags and leaves a dry crater in its place. He cranes his head and waits, and soon the water spills up out of the ground a number of yards away. "_We move at dawn. No sooner_."

"_I feel we have waited too long. Perhaps, with Michael's help—_" but Hester stops shy of insubordination. The way her captain looks at her, with a radiance that lilts and doubles back, makes her believe for an instant she has already gone too far.

Castiel is not malicious in this interaction. No, he is hurt. He is limping like a stag in a pond with its leg wrapped in grasping weeds. He is caught in a gentle trap, and he knows what his sister wants to say, but it doesn't make a difference. "_It is God's will,_" he tells her. "_It is Michael's command. Have faith_."

_"How long have we played this game by rules that make no sense?"_  
Uriel (4.16)

Morning comes and eight years have passed in Hell. It is not exactly a span of time that normally makes a mark on an angel's memory, because they are as old as the Earth, but time spent in Hell is often an exception. The angels feel their age in a new, tired way, and it sucks the warmth from their beings and forces them down in their foxholes. They are all in all a quarter of the number they were at the onset of the siege, and the loss they feel is profound and heartbreaking. They miss their siblings—those that have gone away from life and those that still dwell in Heaven that they may never see again. It is difficult to be brave and ride the waves of their Father's will when they can see the rocks on which they'll soon dash themselves to pieces.

Castiel's company forms on a baked lakebed pockmarked with strange pools. They stand close, more than shoulder to shoulder, like they are anticipating the serration of a sandstorm. Michael makes the call and the inflated force in the heights breaks in two. Akatriel's company holds their ground while Michael guides the forward team over oceans of fiery serpents and blistered souls. The angels are so few; and the demons come down from their cliffs and their towers in a roaring avalanche, flowing like a vulgar vow from the eager mouth of Hell.

Castiel does not know fear. In two years he'll tell Uriel differently, but for now, the odor of molding flowers and the whirring snap of hellhound jaws affects him in the opposite way. He is the sum of his company's valor. Where his brothers and sisters need to see strength and diligence and unwavering faith, he provides. His energy crashes into the lakebed, and in a starburst demons are pitched into the air. The angels are frozen for a fraction of a second, awed by him or disappointed in themselves; and then they let go like white rapids. They let go like warriors of God. In the heavy metal scent, in the pealing of twisting armor and shattering swords, they hear destiny. _Nothing else matters, nothing but this_.

Every front is like this. The angels know their Father and they know their brother, the Archangel. They know combat. Reason is a thing they leave to Michael, now; and Michael shoulders this burden the same as every other. It aches. He grieves between breaths, like a man on his knees watching his home burn to the ground. He can no longer differentiate the cries of his siblings from those of the demons. They all speak the same words. In his most private thoughts—and he does not have many—he prays to his Father, _God, let me save them all_.

_"I just want you to understand what you and I have to do."_  
Michael (5.13)

In the center of Hell, there is The Cage. It is Heaven-wrought and disproportionately beautiful where it is lodged in the writhing, cold muscles of damnation itself. In the time of yore, Hell metastasized from it. Many new and terrible things have been grafted onto Lucifer's cell over the millennia. This is ironic, considering most demons cannot see or perceive The Cage for what it is. Alastair obviously cannot.

When Michael and his company break through the last bastion before The Cage, they are confronted by the Inquisitor of Hell in the form of a whistling miasma. Angels fall out of the air and clang and clatter down, down, down upon winding wires that flash red and wet in the pitch darkness. Their wings snarl on the thorns of broken souls. When the angels can no longer fight or fly, they reach for Michael and become like infected avatars of the Pit.

Michael drives his blade through the heart of the profane smoke and spiritual disease that comprises Alastair. The demon retreats through the bars that bend like earthworms off the central column of Hell. Little cells like birdcages within birdcages fill the space in which Alastair pulls back. Here, Alastair assumes the shape of a monstrous shade of the first man, a heinous insult, and wraps his arms around the throat-less Mathiel. The angels' lost captain is a ghost of his former self. His grace does not resemble that of his brothers' or sisters'. He burns with a cold, discontinuous light that snaps and sparks like a live wire torn in a windstorm.

In a single attack, the Archangel blows apart the exoskeleton of Mathiel's jail. His angels cross swords with winged fiends, and when they are without an adversary they hack at the joints of Hell. The demon that took Mathiel appears as Michael lays into the next shell of twisting bars. Daanen rips through Michael's company and lands with a hollow thump upon the Archangel's back. If he thinks he can shred the general like he did the captain, he is sorely mistaken.

Daanen is a smear of cinder and mash when Michael is through with him. Then, the Archangel turns back to free Mathiel, and he sees Alastair slither into the shadows. The Archangel's first thought is of _The Righteous Man_, of destiny, of the end of all this suffering. Michael flies like a fireball and the cell comes down in burning ruin behind him.

_"It took several angels to rescue you..."_  
Castiel (6.7)

Castiel finds Inias buried in a heap of detritus near to the place where the company and the Legion first collided. He pulls the wounded soldier up, sets him on his feet, and perfunctorily utters to him, "_well fought_," before moving on to the next mountain of death. Rachel sets a hand on Inias' shoulder, warms him in a way that might clean away a little of the stain of Hell. Balthazar and Uriel together heft carcasses of hellhounds and horrors aside, appearing focused and detached from their search at the same time. Hester is a flame in the whirling, grey air, watching for movement.

The battlefield is a scorched graveyard, and bit by bit the angels turn the dirt and uncover blips of light. They appear like new stars, suddenly shining through the black. They come together at the end, when they are certain they are done. There are not many of them left.

_The demon Alastair moves in the south_, Michael relays, and the aftermath of the last battle fades away and they are suddenly in the prelude to the next clash. The angels, in each corner of Hell, straighten up and turn their heads, listening to the Archangel's shining command. _Akatriel, to me, and be ready to take the dungeon. Castiel, go to and receive Mathiel, and take control of the heart of Hell. Let no demon travel from corner to corner_. In a strange way, it pains the companies to move, to break from their stations. For almost a decade they have held this territory—these horrible pieces of Hell, their sole achievement in a nightmare of trial and loss—and with so few words, they are ordered to abandon it. They are told not to look back.

Castiel meets Mathiel in a curtain of rose-colored light over a roasting vent some distance from The Cage. It is understood that Michael has moved on with his soldiers in pursuit of Alastair. Although the Archangel said this is how it would happen, Castiel cannot hide that he is stunned. "_Oh, brother_," Mathiel remarks, his light slow, limping, unhurried. "_I know. The demons do not come near me_." Neither angel knows what this means. Of all the sinister implications made by this act of disinterest—mercy? torment?—Castiel finds himself wondering if _The Righteous Man_ could cut into an angel, if they had, without noticing, failed.

Mathiel is changed. It is true that angels mourn. They have not stopped mourning since stepping foot in this place. However, Mathiel is inconsolable, quiet, resolute in a decision he does not share with his siblings. In many ways, Mathiel now reminds Castiel of Anael. "_Our sister died for me_," Mathiel says one night when the scouts change posts. He and Castiel share space with no one else for a brief moment. "_I am not God. I am not Man. She has put this upon me_." Castiel never asks what _this_ is that Mathiel admits in his half-confessions, time after time, when they are alone. He sees the way Mathiel studies his own shadow, and Castiel is certain he does not want to know.

_"She wouldn't kill seven angels. Oh, she'd kill a hundred, a thousand."_  
Alastair (4.16)

On the night that Michael surrounds Alastair, Lilith visits Castiel's camp. The angels meet her with their swords drawn, their light high, their wings raised like hackles on a wolf. She holds her head as if she is balancing a crown upon it. "Here we are, full circle," she says, and her smile is condescending. She has seen a better example of an angel, and this lot consists only of poor excuses. She deigns to sift through them with her eyes, visiting each of them with a doleful look from afar. "You were my guardians. You were supposed to protect me."

Mathiel rushes forward and in an instant his blade is touching the demon queen's chin, and she has her claws in his grace. "Seal's broken. He's _earned_ his title," she hisses, and they stalemate for a second before a missile of black smoke blows between them, tearing away the angel's sword. Demons rally in defense of Lucifer's first consort. The angels sortie. Castiel is a breath away from slicing off Lilith's hand when Michael's will sounds off like an explosion in his mind.

It is not words the Archangel relays, but a bugle call. Every angel feels Michael's intensity like a crack over their head, and in their moment of pain and confusion they forget their own battles. A position, like coordinates, bleeds through the alarm. It lacks a name, but the angels instantly know it by the resonance of its energy. This place exists no where near to where Michael holds Alastair; rather, it lies on the other side of Hell.

_Lilith is here_, Castiel's company communicates immediately. _The first seal is already broken_.

Michael's reply is silent emphasis, reiteration. He is unaffected by the fact, but the other angels in their ignorance are winded and pale stricken. He hurts for them not too long, choosing instead to focus on the future.

In a flash, the present comes back, and Castiel and his company stand faced with Lilith and her Legion. No more than a second has passed, but the shift in their priorities causes a jarring dissonance. Cat-eyed demons stare off, their heads leaning into a sound that goes unheard by angels. It seems the demons, too, know what has transpired. Time then moves in staggered pulses of light. Mathiel rips away from Lilith. Castiel's blade swings through empty air. The company shoots off into the Pit. Demons howl after them. Lilith's voice rings in the steam filled cavern, promising, "we're going to save the world!"

_"And it is written that the first seal shall be broken when a righteous man sheds blood in hell._  
_As he breaks, so shall it break."_  
Alastair (4.16)

Michael charges Akatriel with the prisoner Alastair, then he takes wing. _Hold Lilith back_. He gives this command bitterly, knowing the demon queen to be a force that stands alone—knowing he is ordering his brothers and sisters to die if their deaths can spare him time. Michael blasts through the barriers and battle lines that rear in his path. His speed burns a trench along the spine of Hell. He has far to go.

Castiel has not a thought in his head for Lilith as she has chosen to stay at her throne. He recognizes that there is a miscommunication between himself and his general, but Castiel is preoccupied. Mathiel is sputtering, lagging behind the pack as they race the Legion. Castiel reaches out to his brother, and in an instant he sees Orphiel's grace in his memory, he feels the ghost of his own disapproval. These are actions fueled by desperation, not love for his Father. This is not a thing an angel does, not a thing Castiel does. Yet, he hears a memory of Mathiel saying _she has put this upon me_ and he can't stop. He won't leave his brother behind. His suffering, their suffering, must be for _something_.

Mathiel grabs hold of him, drags at him, and together they flounder. At this height on Earth they would be punching through clouds and scraping mountaintops, but this is Hell and the Legion curls up in a roiling smoke and just takes them. Their circuit of light is rent. The hellions wrap around Mathiel—guttering and reaching and _terrifyingly_ serene Mathiel—and drag him into the horde. This is the last time Castiel sees him. Thereafter, Castiel is numb to the skeletal tendrils of liquid hatred that blind him, bind him, and whip him away. Above, the company scatters like a dandelion in a dust devil.

In some sense, there is little difference between flying and falling. Castiel is not sure which is taking him where he is going now. Maybe that's poetic. He'd like to think, when he slams sidelong into a blood caked metal mesh, he does not do so on purpose. His blade is missing. There are… other… things missing. His perception isn't as sharp as it was a moment ago. He feels a mach slower. It doesn't hurt like he thought it would—dying. He can't quite tell if he_ is_ dying. Unsure of what to do, he thinks of God. If this is his last thought, it should be of his Father. This should effect something, he believes: solace, understanding, peace. There is only a resounding silence and a suffocating suspicion that he has committed a crime, a choice, a failure that can never be undone.

There's a sort of thrumming getting in the way of his thought process. It belatedly occurs to him that this is Michael's voice. Castiel judges by the sensation of the command that Michael has found himself alone. _Hold fast!_ Heaven's general tells his siblings. Castiel becomes aware that he can move only by the fact that he does so automatically. The idea that the war was going to march on without him leaves him perplexed. Wasn't it over? A moment slips by. The demons don't seem to be coming. No angels come looking for him, either. This is what death is, isn't it?

Flying is more difficult than it was, than it has always been. There's a weight in him that makes him too heavy. His wings feel as though they are coated in blood or something worse. When Castiel finally reaches Michael, he sees his own fault in Michael wrestling with Lilith's entourage. Castiel breathes out, calls to his company. They shoot like stars across the Pit, loyal and true.

Castiel tears a fiend off of Michael's heel and burns it to ash. Two more of Hell's abominable soldiers go like this, and then Castiel is spent. He flickers in a pool of light in a gaping valley and watches the battle work like lightning across the sky. The Archangel is enveloped in teeth and nails and claws, but he fights with tireless splendor, and he never looks down. So, Michael never sees the Knight approach.

He knows her name before he sees her face. He feels her axe bite into his side first. "_Abaddon!_" There she is, Hell smoke and red wings. Michael grips her blade, wrenches it loose. He swings on her and they lock their weapons, and the sound of it booms and wrecks the arena around them. They dance in the dark, chasing each other as the sun chases the moon chases the sun. She is too happy to lead him away, and then the Legion heaves itself upon Alastair's dungeon.

_All is lost_. Castiel sings, because it is all he can do. _Lilith is taking The Righteous Man_. His mind replays for him his last sight of Mathiel, eclipsed by the Legion, over and over; and the shock of losing Haziel, and the sting of Orphiel's death, and there are pinpricks for every passed angel, so many that it becomes like hard rain smothering his grace. The promise of this fate for the last of them brings him low. They were martyrs falling like dominoes, because they couldn't leave each other alone.

_"Fought by each other's sides, served together away from home, for what seems like forever."_  
Castiel (4.16)

Energy and anger crackles like electricity between the remaining angels of Castiel's company. They sink in the air, fighting back the demons that dive into the valley. _No_, they say in their vigilance, their persistence, _we will not let Hell have our captain, our brother_.

_Castiel_. Michael is in another place long off, and he says the name quietly. Perhaps he speaks to just this one sibling. Castiel takes his grace in his hands and impels it to coil, to be whole. _Castiel, go to, if you are able still_. The command is a puzzle. Castiel summons the last vestiges of his strength and ascends aimlessly. His company encircles him. When they are free to do so, they glance at Castiel for a sign. Michael bids him,_ Castiel, go to, for I will not be there soon, and deliver The Righteous Man from Hell_.

Combat whines around him, but Castiel cannot hear it. He wonders, briefly, if he looks down now, will his shadow give him pause. Alastair's dungeon hangs in the sky, though, and it is all Castiel has eyes for suddenly. He is self-possessed, and the image of him staring wide and free haunts his company after he fires by them. "_Follow!_" he tells them, and he barely remembers to tell them anything, and he barely senses their compliance. First, Hester, then the rest go in her wake. The angels explode, righteous and wild, and the demons burn to soot and stick to the wet floor of the dungeon. Bars bend, melt. Instruments of torture spin away into the Pit. The company overturns the rack and breaks apart the machinery of the chamber.

Castiel stands—he, the eye of a storm of white light—enthralled by the sight of this consecrated man among men. Even with the remnants of his humanity hanging knotted in his own madness, and the fate of beginning the end laying like flagellation scars upon his shoulders, and his bleeding heart being scabbed with spite, _The Righteous Man_ continues to be an infinite artwork of God. It is beyond Castiel just now to think of this hapless encounter as anything other than wrong, but his actions are sanctified so he is dauntless, even jubilant. For every crack in the foundation of his ideology he suffers, he is inspired. It is too overwhelming.

"_Hello, Dean_," Castiel says, because he knows this man's name, knows it like he knows God by faith alone. "_It is a privilege_." Castiel does not move his sight from _The Righteous Man_, and he goes on, "_make us a door_." Castiel glints in a way that is like smiling when Dean, in all his mortal beauty, takes a fighting stance. The angels smolder and cut into the ceiling with their raw grace. The company moves with a dignity and providence afforded to them by carrying out this task. It is a catching sentiment. Castiel burns fiercely and holds out his hand.

Dean slides his heel back, pulls his arm up, presses his filth slick palm into one side of his bleeding head. He doubts salvation, doesn't recognize the will of God. As a matter of fact, it seems to cause him pain. Castiel realizes this slowly, so much so that it is the noise of his company skirmishing with demons that pulls him out of his daze. The Legion is redoubling their efforts to take the dungeon, and after ten years, it is time for the angels to leave Hell.

It doesn't occur to Castiel that Dean can't comprehend Enochian or an angel's voice, that he has only seen demons for forty on thirty years, that he has no reason to believe in angels or in God, that he flinches at the lick of holy fire because his mother burned to death. Ever after, Castiel will make every effort to be more sympathetic, but for now he pours forward without hesitation. There is a whisper of memory, of reaching for a brother in the dark, that runs through his mind, and then Castiel takes hold of _The Righteous Man_.

_Dean Winchester is saved._

_"Well, it took… everything to get me here."_  
Castiel (7.21)

Before Anael left, she told Castiel about a saying mankind had which went, _you can never go home again_. At the time, Castiel could not make sense of it, and he was content. When he returns to Heaven after the siege of Hell, however, Anael's warning is like an old injury aching for nothing. He thinks that if he had never heard her say it, maybe there would be no grief in him. Hester will remind him several years from now in a manner that will be harder to dismiss. In the meantime, Castiel lives in a haze.

Shortly after his homecoming, Castiel is summoned by the Archangels. Raphael witnesses as Michael debriefs Castiel; and then Castiel receives new orders. "_Plans have changed, but destiny perseveres_," Michael says, but he doesn't explain. "_Dear brother, take a vessel. You must go to The Righteous Man and convince him to turn to faith_."

Castiel does as he is told, and he carries his orders for as long as he can. It is not too long, after all.

* * *

Author's PS: Apologies for gratuitous use of bargain-bin angels. For your decrypting pleasure:

Mathiel, angel of decisive action (at the right time) and strength, associated with harmony and learning. He's an angel of Tuesday, fitting considering Castiel's favorite Heaven.  
Haziel, angel of acceptance and faith, associated with diplomacy and modesty.  
Orphiel, angel of concentration (to keep from making mistakes), associated with independence.  
Zaliel, angel of challenges and (to react with) grace.  
Akatriel, angel of justice, authority (as a hindrance), and direction, associated with analysis and communication.

_Cross posted from AO3, May 17, 2013_


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